The present invention relates to a sorting device for sorting out differently sized thin pieces such as tickets, metal pieces, coins, or other tokens according to their size, and more particularly to a mechanism in such a sorting device for collecting sorted-out pieces in a manner to facilitate later processing.
Small articles of different sizes can manually be sorted out according to their size, but the manual sorting operation has been time-consuming and subjected to errors. Various automatic sorting mechanisms have heretofore been used for mechanically or electrically classifying and sorting out different kinds of pieces according to their size. Though the known automatic sorters are highly effective to sort out relatively heavy and thick objects such as coins or nuts, the mechanisms fail to divide relatively light and thin pieces into groups according to their size. No sorting device has been developed which is capable of sorting out light and thin articles without suffering from errors. It has therefore been customary practice to resort to manual procedures for sorting out pieces of paper such as tickets, pieces of cloth, or thin pieces of metal.